CHRISTIAN JEWS by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 15, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 15.

CHRISTIAN JEWS.

By Editor

Most of our readers are probably aware that there is in Russia a number of converted Jews under the leadership of Joseph Rabinowitz, who not only have embraced the faith of Jesus, but who still observe the Bible Sabbath. The following sketch of their leader, which we take from the Gospel in All Lands, will, we are sure, be of interest:—

Energetic in character and ambitious in self-improvement and the advancement, politically, socially, and morally, of his people, he, years ago, became known as a zealous friend of reform among the Eastern Jews. With an education and enterprise far beyond his brethren, he set about to devise ways and means to attain his ideals and ends. He acquainted himself with the advanced philosophical thought of the West, in the hope that its adoption by his people would elevate them to a higher spiritual plane, and thus secure for them higher ideals and nobler ends. But he soon learned to doubt both the efficiency of the means and the possibility of applying them to a people whom centuries of persecution and ultra-conservatism had been hardening to principles so at variance with their traditional ideas.

He again attempted to win them away from their greed for gain, which, next to their formalistic religious exercises, is the all-controlling and all-degrading factor in the mind and life of the oriental Jew. But his endeavors to establish agricultural colonies for them, both at home and in the holy land, proved abortive. While in Palestine, the conviction ripened in him, through an independent study of the New Testament in its relation to the Old, that Israel had made the mistake of its national life, and had become untrue to its historic mission, by the rejection of Christ.

This conviction concerning Christ, not as the Saviour of the world, but as the embodiment and fulfillment of the prophecies of old, and of the ideals and aims of Israel as a nation, is the central thought around which the whole movement circles. The principles enunciated by the humble Nazarene are recognized as those which alone can accomplish the destinies of the people, and enable them to attain the end for which they were set apart as a chosen people.

It is thus regarded as a serious break in the normal and historical development of Israel that eighteen hundred years ago this people as a nation refused to accept those tenets and principles which are regarded by all Christians, and now also by Rabinowitz and his followers, as the legitimate and only correct outcome of the whole previous historical development of Israel. To heal this breach is the ideal aim of the Kishineff reformers, by setting in anew there where first the chosen people entered upon an erroneous path of national development.

These ideas explain why the Kishineff communion by no means desire to join any of the existing Christian denominations. Their object is to secure the recognition of Christianity, as the genuine and legitimate development of Old Testament Judaism, and as the only means of securing the national prosperity of the Jews as such. For this reason they do not think of ceasing to be Jews. They still keep the seventh day; they still practice circumcision; they still celebrate the Paschal feast as a memorial of the deliverance from Egypt—because all these are national characteristics distinguishing them from Germans, from the English, from other peoples, as separate from each other with its own peculiarities.

[And the writer might have added, Because they can find no authority in the Scriptures for neglecting the observance of the Sabbath.]